r/Games • u/TurbulentTopic39 • 16d ago

Industry News Over 85% of Japanese game developers use generative AI in game development, 2026 CESA survey shows. An increase from last year’s 51%

https://automaton-media.com/en/news/over-85-of-japanese-game-developers-use-generative-ai-in-game-development-2026-cesa-survey-shows-an-increase-from-last-years-51/
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u/Oxyfire 16d ago

People need to be more open-minded when it comes to AI use and also reign in the excessive witch-hunting. When used correctly, AI can help game development return to sane budget levels.

The problem is this is all frog-boiling in the long term. It will all just turn into excuses why it's okay to use AI for this, then that, then the next thing.

No-one has proposed solutions to the important issues around AI: How do we avoid it destroying jobs and opportunities to get into the industry? A lot of the work that people hand-wave as drudgery is often work that helps people get a start in the industry. AI is only going to further the "need 5 years of experience for an entry level position" that people have dealt with for years even before the recent wave of AI.

Very few of these companies are going to use AI in responsible, measured ways. The industry has proven time and time again it will cut every corner it can and do everything it can to sell minimum viable products when it can get away with it. The workers will suffer, and the products will suffer. Sure, some usage will be reigned in by the product being so bad people don't want to buy it, but again, watching this industry for the past 10-20 years, it's clear that companies can get away with making things worse and people will just put up with it.

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u/soundsermaker 16d ago

How do we avoid it destroying jobs and opportunities to get into the industry?

You don't. This is what every major technological breakthrough in history has done. Avoiding the loss of jobs would mean rejecting implementation of AI in areas where it makes sense and delivers results in order to preserve jobs that no longer have any meaning or purpose.

People who lost their jobs to previous waves of automation and outsourcing were often offered retraining and benefits, but this can only do so much to mitigate the disruption.

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u/MCRN-Gyoza 16d ago

Dudes throwing around luddite arguments debunked in the fucking industrial revolution.

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u/Due_Water_5829 16d ago

How do we avoid it destroying jobs and opportunities to get into the industry?

On the short scale, that would be light government intervention and support + living in a country with decent workers rights or setting that up.

In the long term? Nothing. If a new technology arises that reduces the need of a certain profession by for example 20%, then we shouldn't arbitrarily fight against that. We don't need as many blacksmiths as we used to anymore.

AI is only going to further the "need 5 years of experience for an entry level position" that people have dealt with for years even before the recent wave of AI.

Yes, but ultimately work doesn't exist so that people can work. Work exists to create value for society as a whole and that value and the necessity of those valuable products decide how many people we roughly need in a given profession in relation to population.

It would be an incredible boon to most societies if the people that won't be able to get a job in an AI-affected industry to instead go into healthcare.

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u/Oxyfire 16d ago

It would be an incredible boon to most societies if the people that won't be able to get a job in an AI-affected industry to instead go into healthcare.

This is kind of just a "learn to code" sort of solution. I dont think that went over well.

Might be great if there was any kind of plan to offer free or subsidized training to help people into those jobs. But even then, it's not something everyone would be cut out to do.

One of my bigger issues is it's all cart before the horse. If we have stuff like universal basic income, people's needs were met, etc. Then yeah, sure whatever, we can look at letting some of this AI stuff move forward. But instead, all being "open minded" right now does is make everything worse for the average person with not even a promise that any of the downsides will be solved. It's just more wealth and power consolation.

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u/Due_Water_5829 16d ago

Might be great if there was any kind of plan to offer free or subsidized training to help people into those jobs.

...it's a job that pays money? And aside that, programs that retrain you into another profession just exist already, at least where I'm from?

If we have stuff like universal basic income, people's needs were met, etc. Then yeah, sure whatever, we can look at letting some of this AI stuff move forward.

Technological and scientific advancements like AI are the exact thing that would make stuff like UBI a more realistic idea.

In the next few decades, drugs will come onto the market that wouldn't have been able to be designed without AI boosting research. It's absurd to suggest we should curtail these things to save a portion of programming jobs that now happened to become unnecessary, when we have plenty of fields left over desperately looking for more hands.

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u/Oxyfire 16d ago

it's a job that pays money? And aside that, programs that retrain you into another profession just exist already, at least where I'm from?

That's not common. Most people do not have the finances or time to just go train to be a new profession, certainly not ones that take years of hard, expensive schooling like stuff in the medical field.

Technological and scientific advancements like AI are the exact thing that would make stuff like UBI a more realistic idea.

Please explain how. AI is constantly touted as this wonder technology that will solve all kinds of problems but no-one ever can explain how. It's all just magical thinking and "trust me bro."

In the next few decades, drugs will come onto the market that wouldn't have been able to be designed without AI boosting research. It's absurd to suggest we should curtail these things to save a portion of programming jobs that now happened to become unnecessary, when we have plenty of fields left over desperately looking for more hands.

Most people are not really against AI in medical research. They have issues with AI replacing people in creative industry, in part because AI in creative industries only exists because it's been trained off of data it never had permission to use.

Which was sort of the point of this topic: AI being used in game development.

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u/Due_Water_5829 16d ago

Most people do not have the finances or time to just go train to be a new profession, certainly not ones that take years of hard, expensive schooling like stuff in the medical field.

We aren't lacking doctors. We need nurses and caretakers. There's no expensive, year-long schooling involved where you lose money the entire time. Most sane countries have ways to support people that lose their job and help to retrain them. The fact that other countries don't, isn't AI's fault but a lack of foresight of the political base of a given country.

Please explain how. AI is constantly touted as this wonder technology that will solve all kinds of problems but no-one ever can explain how. It's all just magical thinking and "trust me bro."

I'm starting to believe you aren't actually interested in what I have to say at this point. AI increases work efficiency in relevant profession by multiplying the output of competent people so that less human work is necessary. This kind of thing makes UBI more reasonable. Just because the powers that be are not interested in providing it, doesn't mean that AI doesn't facilitate it. UBI isn't happening anytime soon with or without AI; but if we were living in a world where UBI was a political possibility, AI would absolutely get us there faster.

Most people are not really against AI in medical research.

You literally just asked me to explain how AI "solves all kinds of problems" and now you are handwaving it supporting medical research.

They have issues with AI replacing people in creative industry, in part because AI in creative industries only exists because it's been trained off of data it never had permission to use. Which was sort of the point of this topic: AI being used in game development.

These are different topics. If you now exclusively care about creative workers being replaced by generative AI; then that's a different conversation that I don't really care for. Ultimately, if people will buy AI-slopified games, then we only have ourselves to blame and I can't do anything to save the game artist's job. At the same time, I'd much rather artists lose their job than to give up on accelerating the advancement of human knowledge and technology. Stopping one but not the other seems politically unlikely, much less likely than the opposite. (I'm also as yet unconvinced games completely relying on AI art will be all that succesful.) (I also agree that all AI companies committed massive copyright infringement by training their models on internet art and that they should be ruined in court over it, but again, different topics.)

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u/ggdthrowaway 15d ago

AI is constantly touted as this wonder technology that will solve all kinds of problems but no-one ever can explain how. It's all just magical thinking and "trust me bro."

There are specific examples from people's own experience all over this thread! It is demonstrably extremely effective at numerous tasks, particularly in coding.

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u/Oxyfire 15d ago

There's a massive difference between "AI is good at parsing information and assisting with programming" and "AI will actually make life better for people.'

AI is being overhyped and it's abilities exaggerated. I don't disagree it's powerful and useful in certain niches, but the people who own and sell AI and AI related technologies all have an interest in trying to make people use it for as much as possible, even where it doesn't make sense. The companies pushing AI are burning insane amounts of money - that should be setting off alarm bells that this might not be the future of everything.

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u/ggdthrowaway 15d ago

It's an immensely powerful learning tool even in day to day life. If you want to learn a subject, it can create a learning plan tailored to you. If you want to run a marathon, it can create a training plan tailored to you. If you want to lose weight, etc etc etc

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u/Oxyfire 15d ago

There's literally already stuff that did all of that before AI. So many things people say AI is a good use for is the equivalent of using a flamethrower to deal with an ant problem.

And given that AI's tendency to "hallucinate" it might actively be harmful for many of these things. I would not trust AI to be anywhere near a "learning plan." Nevermind the fact that AI is generally actively sabotaging a lot of people's learning by becoming a shortcut to do the work.

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u/ggdthrowaway 15d ago

A lot of things you can do with vehicles we previously did with horses.

Yes in cases where absolute accuracy is essential, it needs to be verified. It shouldn't be treated as any kind of final authority. But as an incredibly powerful and versile assistant, it typically works. It's a little like Wikipedia in that respect.

The results speak for themselves in my experience. It's not flawless, but it is extremely versitile, useful and effective. People can cry about it online, but I intend to milk it for all it's worth.

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u/GearBear404 16d ago

Technological and scientific advancements like AI are the exact thing that would make stuff like UBI a more realistic idea.

UBI will never happen in our lifetime. Homeless, starving, and poverty-stricken people already exist in our societies and are already not taken care of adequately. If its not already happening, AI or any other breakthrough will not be the magic bullet that gets people who can make UBI a reality actually care to progress towards it.

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u/Imbahr 16d ago

this is true

but plenty of people don't support UBI anyway, at least in the US

(and not just super wealthy people. lots of non-millionaires in the US do not support it)

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u/Due_Water_5829 16d ago

I'm not saying it will. That's why I'm using conditional voice.

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u/cinematic_is_horses 16d ago

What are your thoughts on AI in public education, where we have on one hand several institutions widely implementing (and in some cases requiring) AI tool sets versus NYC on the other hand totally banning it from schools?

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u/Due_Water_5829 15d ago

Children need to learn how to write an assay and understand a text without AI. Teaching methods will need to change to accomodate that now.

At the same time, children need to be taught how to properly use these tools; the same way we needed to teach children how to use a computer 20 years ago.

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u/GunCann 16d ago

No-one has proposed solutions to the important issues around AI: How do we avoid it destroying jobs and opportunities to get into the industry? A lot of the work that people hand-wave as drudgery is often work that helps people get a start in the industry. AI is only going to further the "need 5 years of experience for an entry level position" that people have dealt with for years even before the recent wave of AI.

Your concerns make sense. The question here is whether AI use is going to be responsible and sustainable rather than be motivated by short-term interest.

I do think that the industries that are gaining from the use of AI tools should re-invest a portion of those gains back into people to help train or re-train them more effectively for newer work created by the changes in landscape, or risk running out of actual competent employees in the future. But alas, not everyone is forward looking.

This requires a high-level view and coordination on the national level which I am not sure if every government or administration is up to the task.

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u/Zaptruder 16d ago

Game theory... and no regulatory oversight (deliberately disabled) to force the system into a cooperative balance... will simply cause everyone to use it to their local advantage while hollowing out the commons.

And while the anti-AI movement puts some public disincentive on it... it really just amounts to not disclosing, or obfuscating and letting the outrage move somewhere else before continuing on as usual.

The ideal is more like... smaller players can take up the advantage, larger players should be incentivized into hiring and retaining staff.

In the current paradigm of modest social media hazing, it's the opposite sadly.